Sir George Cayley is believed to have been born at Paradise House, near St Mary’s Church, although St Nicholas Street has also been claimed. He had a good scientific education and inherited his family’s estate at Brompton, near Scarborough. He was a founding member of the Scarborough Philosophical Society and represented the town in parliament.
Today he is considered the ‘Father of Aviation’. He identified the forces acting on a potential flying machine – weight, lift, drag and thrust – and their relationships. Based on these theories, Cayley conducted experiments on aerodynamics, which he published in scientific journals. His findings, contained in his famous paper ‘On Aerial Navigation’, abandoned older theories of flight based on copying birds with flapping wings which create both lift and forward motion (building ‘Ornithopters’) – replacing them with a machine which created thrust with separate cambered (curved) wings and a tail to create lift.
This concluded in a test flight in 1853 in Brompton, in which Cayley, nearly 80 years old, convinced his somewhat reluctant coachman to man his glider. The coachman became the first man to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft, travelling 274m (900 ft) across Brompton Dale. He survived the crash landing, apparently telling Cayley, ‘I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, and not to fly’.
In 1909 Wilbur Wright, who alongside his brother Orville achieved the first powered flight, said that, ‘About 100 years ago an Englishman, Sir George Cayley, carried the science of flying to a point which had never been reached before and which it scarcely reached again during the last century.’
Cayley did not only experiment with flight. He built an artificial hand for the son of one of his tenants, tension-spoked wheels in 1808, a ‘universal railway’ (a forerunner of caterpillar tracks), and a gunpowder engine, designed to power his flying machines.
The businessman and airline owner, Sir Richard Branson, dressed in period clothing, replicated Cayley’s flight as part of its 150th anniversary, watched by Cayley’s descendants. This time the glider landed safely.
